Yes, it turns out, and "Life After Beth" proves it. Plaza, the hilariously deadpan actress who, in movies like "Safety Not Guaranteed," manages to infuse her hipster-than-thou sensibilities with real soul (see also: "Parks and Recreation"), brings life to her role as a dead person but can't quite do the same for the movie. Writer and director Jeff Baena has some good ideas, but he isn't sure where to go with them.

Plaza plays Beth Slocum, the title character. At the beginning of the movie she is dead, killed by a snake bite on a solo hike. Her boyfriend, Zach (Dane DeHaan), is wracked not only by grief but guilt; he never wanted to go hiking with her, and they were having problems at the time of her death.

Zach mopes around, to the concern of his parents (Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines) and the chagrin of his brother Kyle (Matthew Gray Gubler), a security guard with serious cop envy. So Zach spends most of his time over at the Slocums' house, playing chess with Beth's dad, Maury (John C. Reilly), while her mom, Geenie (Molly Shannon), packs her daughter's belongings into boxes.

Then one day Maury stops answering the door and won't return Zach's calls. Zach snoops around and, to his shock, discovers something unusual: Beth, walking around the house. He barges in over the objection of the Slocums, and Beth greets him as if nothing ever happened -- including their previous troubles.

Dane DeHaan stars as Zach, who is devastated after his girlfriend, Beth, dies unexpectedly. After she suddenly rises from the dead, he slowly realizes she is the not the way he remembered her.

The effect is, as one might guess, unsettling to everyone involved, with the exception of the clueless Beth, whose only concern is the test she has to take tomorrow. (No one knows what she's talking about, but they don't want to push her too far.)

There is, of course, a complication: Beth is dead, her friends and family attended her funeral and now she is back home, where she likes to hang out in the attic. Zach wants to tell her the truth. Maury does not. This tension, along with the idea of what we do with one more unlikely shot at romance, even under rather unusual circumstances, is intriguing.

Instead, it turns into a zombie movie. Which is also OK, as anyone who has seen and loved "Shaun of the Dead" can attest. But that film blended horror and humor in a much more satisfying way. This is a talented comedic cast, but in the second half of the film they don't get to do a lot that's funny. (One exception is Garry Marshall as Zach's dead grandfather who returns, complaining as he must have in real life about everything. He, too, craves spending time in the attic and gets the best line in the movie, even if it is a throwaway: "I fought in World War II! Don't tell me about attics!")

The attic business is never explained. Nor is the reanimation of other dead people, or how widespread it is. It's less a zombie apocalypse as it is a kind of zombie flash mob. It's … OK, nothing more. Despite the best efforts of Plaza and the rest of the cast, "Life After Beth" never winds up being as scary or as funny as it ought to be.